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That game already exists.

Here's an article by a Microsoft researcher detailing how they can make games forcefully addictive using the same techniques used to keep a mouse pressing a button indefinitely in a skinner box.

Enjoy your box.

free-to-play hasn't spread to the consoles

I would say they are spreading slower. Dusk 514, DC Universe Online come to mind. I wager it's the same way how FPSes showed up on PCs first before consoles. After all, hardware wise, a console is a lesser PC.

As said, I see MMOs with subscriptions as the precursor to F2P, and those do exist on consoles, even if as part of a multiplatform (PC + console) release (FF11, FF14, the former was also released on the PS2)

A cooperative platformer or a fighting game is unlikely to be made F2P

Oh, they are trying. And the idea of Mario to F2P has been toyed with.

Oh, if we go back to the PC side, MUGEN has been a free (as in beer, not in speech though) engine for fighting games for a while now.

Besides, I apologize for being unclear. By "free engine" I meant that the engine is free software as defined by the Free Software Foundation. This means end users have the legal right and capability to 0. run the engine for any purpose, including use with self-created mission packs, 1. mod the engine, 2. provide copies of the engine to other people, and 3. provide copies of the mods to other people.

Fair enough. I do think what I said still applies though. See below.

If someone's game sucks, and the game's engine is free software, someone can create an entirely new game on top of it, possibly in a different genre entirely. Modders call this practice a "total conversion".

My point is that somebody had to pay for development, be it the map pack or the game engine. Whether you open source your game engine or not, the business has to pay for its development.

So a free engine, pay for map packs business model has a higher risk, since if the map pack fails to sell, you can't make money from the engine. A proprietary engine could be licensed out, or even sold as an asset should your company had to be liquidated.

This also explains why in F2P games the "map packs" (general game play) are designed to have more chances at extracting money out of the player, and the move towards DLC. As game engines become less profitable, people have to squeeze more out of map packs.

Now, id is pretty cool in that they release their older code. Really, people could go and make games using an open Doom 3 engine, and some do, just not big studios.

Which brings me to the following question. I think to answer your question "why major game devs don't offer more open engines", we also have to ask: why do major game devs license proprietary engines over using the free ones available? Free ones are available (which indies and smaller shops use), so why?

Personally, I think it's because proprietary engines actually do provide a competitive advantage for your game. All else equal, my generic FPS will outsell your generic FPS if my engine is prettier than yours. And I don't want you to know the secrets (code) to how I made my engine prettier.

I don't think this is what you want.

He probably means this one:

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131899/using_a_live_orchestra_in_game_.php?print=1

Hmm. I don't think that makes it ethical. If the business model relies upon so-called "whales", it's fundamentally unethical. And cosmetic-only microtransactions can do that just as well as other sorts of microtransactions: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/195806/

Chris started the Kickstarter for SC to prove to investors that there was still a call for this type of game. EA et al. have refused to invest in this sort of game for years as there was "no interest in space exploration games" but Chris wanted to prove that there was. The initial goal of $2M was seen as HUGE at the time. It made that goal with no problems. Funding was also flowing in via the Star Citizen site and hasn't stopped since! With the crowdfunding that has happened, Chris is now able to make the game that he (and all of the fans that have pledged) want's to make. The kickstarter was but a small part of it all. It brought awareness to the masses that the game might not have, had they stayed with just their site for funding. There was a comment of "People who are sure of their product use their own money..." somewhere up in the thread... Chris spent 12+ months choosing an engine and making a tech demo before any of it even started. THAT was his own money put into the game. The kickstarter video featured in-engine visuals of what was possible. HIS investment of time and money made that happen. Another comment was about feature creep. Nothing that has been released with the stretch goals is creep. They have all been planned for, depending on the budget. They are not making things up on the spur of the moment for if they get to a certain amount of money. By keeping the pledgers well informed of what is happening, as well as listening to their opinions, Chris has allowed the community to see a hell of a lot more of the design process than any game previously created. The release of the hangar demo has also helped. Getting bug reports and feedback from the community WAY before it would normally be seen. They have just hit the $20 MILLION mark. Chris has said that at $23M EVERYTHING will have been crowd-funded to make the game. That includes all the credit charges they have to pay for transactions and the % they have to pay Kickstarter. It seemed that it was a long way off just a few short months ago. Now it seems inevitable, and at this rate, will happen by the end of the year. For those that want to read more into Chris' ideas about crowd-funding and Kickstarter, have a look here : http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/200998/chris_roberts_on_star_citizen_.php And for anyone that's interested in the game but not looked, have a read of the articles on the website or drop by the forums: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/

So the focus on consoles in the industry, plus the lingering zombie life of Windows XP, had basically kept everyone stuck at Direct3D 9/Shader Model 3 and 32-bit for years. With next-generation consoles moving to Direct3D 11/Shader Model 5 and 64-bit, we should see more PC titles that take advantage of the latest generation PC hardware. BTW, for some technical background on 64-bit and gaming, see http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3602/sponsored_feature_ram_vram_and_.php

Wouldn't it be fairly easy today for the "maze" to be randomly generated for each player, so the puzzle's solution couldn't be shared online.

That's happening now with "Cloudberry Kingdom" where levels are generated on-the-fly.

More:

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/170049/how_to_make_insane_procedural_.php?print=1

Real men use Emacs...

No kidding, kiddo, here is a list of Naughty Dog's Jak and Daxter development tools:
Allegro, Common Lisp, Visual C++, Maya, Photoshop, X Emacs, Visual Slick Edit, tcsh, Exceed, CVS

From Gamasutra and Visual C++ is there just because it was the only compiler supported by Sony at the time.

The other part of it being a dick move is them denying refunds based on it not being crowdsourcing when IGP's CEO was saying that it WAS a crowdsourcing profram everywhere someone would listen: http://www.vg247.com/2012/10/30/mechwarrior-online-to-be-a-lot-better-thanks-to-crowdfunding/ "Speaking to Gamasutra, Infinite Game Publishing parent company boss Nick Foster said that MechWarrior Online was traditionally funded at first, but then used crowdfunding to make up any shortfalls. “We’ve raised minimal investment funds to build a viable product for each of our games. We then launch it [in beta] and use that minimum viable product to start generating an income stream,” he said. “We keep a very close partnership with our developers and use that income to reinvest in the game, build out the features that the users want, and head into a period of ongoing development. New content, new features. “The product will be a lot better for players because of the crowdfunding. It’s allowed us to maintain a higher level of ongoing development in the product, than if we were waiting for momentum to build immediately after going live. In the next few months, we’ll be able to release a lot more features.” http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/180401/ MechWarrior Online's long-awaited open beta begins today, partially made possible by a successful crowdfunding initiative that's raised over $5 million, without the help of Kickstarter. http://massively.joystiq.com/2012/10/29/mechwarrior-online-the-story-of-how-one-mmo-got-crowd-funded-wi/ "Nick Foster, CEO of Infinite Game Publishing's parent company 7G Entertainment, explained some of the rationale behind this approach to funding. "The product will be a lot better for players because of the crowdfunding. It's allowed us to maintain a higher level of ongoing development in the product than if we were waiting for momentum to build immediately after going live. In the next few months, we'll be able to release a lot more features." http://www.crowdsourcing.org/article/mechwarrior-onlines-unconventional-crowdfunding-pays-off/20390 "The success of the Founder's Program reinforces IGP's vision to help independent developers build exceptional games with the right economic model for the global marketplace," says IGP CEO Nick Foster. http://venturebeat.com/2012/10/29/the-first-of-three-major-titles-from-igp-mechwarrior-online-moves-into-its-open-beta-test/

Does this mean that, without crowdfunding, the game would simply not come into being? "Not quite," he says. "The product will be a lot better for players because of the crowdfunding.

"Stallman's piece focuses exclusively on TPM being implemented as a mandated piece where either the gov't or the media industry has the keys. "

Not quite, the same way F2P games and always online DRM made it so far. Most people are tech illiterate, all that's needed to get TPM out there is a dumb public and some widget they will always buy mindlessly like phones. I expect phones and/or some aspect of videogames to be where TPM is first implemented. The upper classes in america are obsessed with manipulating the public mind for their own corporate profits. I suspect there are people working right this moment to find a way to push more hardware DRM and legal bullshit. I imagine we'll first see this from the game industry and then it will seep into other industries.

The idea that Stallman is 'alarmist' given how dystopian, authoritarian and anti-freedom american copyright and patent law has become and its negative effect on people owning the digital products they buy is already cause for alarm. The fact that digital goods are effectively infininite and people are talking moronically about selling 'used digital games' (bizarre aspect of american capitalist thinking in the non scarce digital world).

See this article, game developers and publisher are seriously totally in bizarro world trying to get rid of the used game market.

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/DanRogers/20130806/197733/THE_FUTURE_OF_RESELLING_DIGITAL_VIDEO_GAMES.php

Aye, but once it got going the PS3 was able to do some heavy numbers. Part of that is because even with a slow start, it had hardware more-or-less on spec with the 360, so mutli-platform games were easy enough to bring over once it had a good base, not to mention HD collections of games after the fact.

The Wii U has no such future potential. No matter how many units it sells, the power and capabilities will always be far less than the Xbone and PS4, so devs not only have to worry about a small install base but would also have to go through the trouble of stripping out many "next gen" elements (mainly graphical, but perhaps some advanced AI or mob count, too) to make it play nice on the Wii U, which gamers don't want at all.[1] Furthermore, the attach rate on the original Wii was the worst for third parties out of all three consoles last gen at a bit over half of the overall attach rate, versus >75% on each of the other two (Source; however, it's from Nov 2008, and I'm having an incredibly hard time finding more recent numbers; Nintendo's own site shows a similar attach rate, though, so I doubt the overall ratio changed much for them).

So, with a small install base, underpowered hardware, and a far smaller third party attach rate than its competitors, what is the point in smaller third parties putting anything on the Wii U? And without third party games, why would anyone buy a Wii U unless they were big fans of Nintendo's first party properties, few of which have been announced in any concrete way? So Nintendo has thrust itself into a catch 22 that I doubt it will get out of this generation. With luck they'll have a repeat of the Gamecube; otherwise it's the N64 all over again.

[1] Dead Rising: Chop Till' You Drop for the Wii is an excellent example of what happens when this is attempted.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/195310/Video_iOS_Android_myths_dispelled.php Here is a post mortem from a game developer who released two mobile games on iOS and Android. He briefly explains that both of the games ran perfectly fine on all but 3 devices. They weren't targeting a specific version of Android. They're supported devices were over 1900 devices for each game. So the fragmentation isn't as big of an issue as Apple likes to talk it up to being. And after the T-Mobile announcement today the fragmentation should only get better from here.

Statement titled "A Note from Tim"

Those of you who have been following along in the documentary know about the design vs. money tension we've had on this project since the early days. Even though we received much more money from our Kickstarter than we, or anybody anticipated, that didn't stop me from getting excited and designing a game so big that it would need even more money.

I think I just have an idea in my head about how big an adventure game should be, so it's hard for me to design one that’s much smaller than Grim Fandango or Full Throttle. There's just a certain amount of scope needed to create a complex puzzle space and to develop a real story. At least with my brain, there is.

As a side note, it appears that a majority of the backers (or at least, those who identify themselves as backers online) are fine with expanding the scope of the game. And also, that those who complain the loudest against it do not appear to have put any money into the project (like parent poster).

Well yeah, other than playing civilizations colonizing ancient earth, turning population points into additional cities, trading resources like iron and bronze between other players, starvation killing off population, the tech tree... and the bulk of the actual EFFECTS from the tech tree like astronomy letting you get across oceans, yeah, you know, totally unrelated.

In any case it was close enough that MicroProse bought the rights to it. Which means that Sid isn't a cheating scumbag, as the original game designer made a buck. And Sid and co. certainly made improvements that meshed well with the medium. And Sid was a brilliant guy that worked on a lot of early games that were damned good. But he gets a lot of credit for something that he, you know, stole.

Here's a citation. If that'll help:

One of the most repeated and touted inspirations for Sid Meier's Civilization is the earlier Avalon Hill board game of the same name, designed by Francis Tresham for Hartland Trefoil in Britain. While Meier had no doubt heard of the game prior to 1990 through his connections with Bruce Shelley, he insists that the influence is not as strong as some claim. "I had not played that before I did Civilization," says Meier. "I played it later. I remember there were some cards and trading. It was more ancient; it didn't really come into any sort of modern or medieval times."

But connections, however thin, were there: Bruce Shelley had not only worked for Avalon Hill, the American publisher of Tresham's Civilization, but he created the American localization of Tresham's 1929 railroad game, a game which served as an admitted inspiration for Meier's earlier Railroad Tycoon. It should come as no surprise, then, that Shelley was intimately familiar with Tresham's Civilization. "I had played it many times," recalls Shelley. "I believe Sid had a copy of the game and looked at the components. I owned the original board game, but don't recall if I brought it into the office."

There are several more data points in this article. Android game revenues do not appear to be ahead of iOS game revenues, but there have been several articles at Gamasutra that suggest that the gap is nowhere near as much as expected.

This article is missing the point. It was a dig at Android for hurting developers, not necessarily users.

That was the point of the Apple graphic, sure, but who cares? Developers, sure, but the evidence is that that doesn't matter, because developers will follow the users.

If you project the trends out another year or two -- and I see no reason why that's an unreasonable thing to do -- we're rapidly approaching the point where even if average Android users spend less money on apps, Android is going to so completely dominate the smartphone market that it won't matter. Already some app developers (particular game makers) are seeing Android revenues surpass iOS revenues, and that's just going to increase.

Ultimately, if fragmentation doesn't hurt user adoption, it won't hurt developer adoption.

I actually hope the current trends don't continue; I'd like to see Ubuntu phone or Windows phone, or something, start to gain some share, and for Apple to hold onto its share, because I believe that competition is important.

(Disclaimer: I work for Google, but they don't speak for me and I don't speak for them.)

Evidence suggests otherwise. Android vs iOS Game Myths

Where'd you get the idea of "lack of indy[sic] gaming"?

By their statement that they would allow only publisher on the XBone.
They also said XBLIG won't be coming to XBone.
And they stopped XNA and indie outreach programs.

Needed citations here and on Google search: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/192779/Indies_on_Xbone_Wheres_the_beef.php

There was a GDC talk given by the creator of Retro City Rampage that touched on this very thing: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/194311/Video_Shipping_Retro_City_Rampage_on_17_SKUs_at_once.php

In it he touches on these requirements and if I remember right the difficulty with becoming your own publisher is you have to have published two retail games before Microsoft will consider you a publisher. The problem with that is that publishing retail games is expensive. The with Microsoft's requirement is it ignores the change in landscape that allows non-retail games and the publisher's limited role because of that.

See link below. Also, Microsoft pledged to have a independent creator program and is rumored to announce a new Xbox developer program at the BUILD developer conference on June 26th.

http://gamasutra.com/blogs/JamesSilva/20130523/192832/Were_Indie_we_like_Microsoft_Too_Controversial.php

wrote this post on our blog a few months ago to express how absolutely weird and unfortunate I thought it was that the trending perception of Microsoft and indies had gotten so bad that silly creative decisions of mine were being taken as Microsoft's ever-burgeoning evilness toward indies, or something. My message was this: we're indie, we make the games we want to make, Microsoft publishes them, and the past five years of this have been great, and it's too bad that that's not super newsworthy, because this whole time it just feels like I must watch, powerless, as Lumbergh keeps taking my red stapler.

Then Xbox One happened, and a longtime fan of ours posted this on my facebook wall:

Questionable grammar aside, I was super glad he posted this, because through no fault of his own he's unwittingly illustrated what happens when these narratives blow up. You know that thing about no self-publishing on Xbox One? The meaning of that quote was that the partner/publisher relationship is currently the same (i.e. what we, an indie studio, been doing for the last five years) but they're exploring ways to improve it. Basically "everything's the same, stay tuned for improvements" mutated into "no indies on Xbox One, ever" in a few hours.

Finally, a disclaimer: I do not think there is a vast conspiracy to unjustly villify Microsoft. That would be weird, possibly an indicator of neurosis, even. I just wish I could add my "everything is fine" experience to the mix more often.

And with that, here's the original post:

In Charlie Murder, the whole band gets Windows Phones on the fictional t2f (short for ta2fön) network. There’s a bunch of stuff you can use your phone for, like email (some of it rote, some of it interesting), camera phone, and squid-themed microblogging site squ.iddl.us. I thought it was a fun way to give your characters a bit of an info hub, and I’ve been a big fan of Windows Phone ever since my Samsung Focus and its marvelous bulging battery bomb (that’s another story). Also, we have a game on Windows Phone, and we definitely make a buck or two whenever someone buys it, so that’s cool. Yet still, I felt the need to tweet this:

In the comments in Joystiq’s rad Charlie Murder preview write up, there were a few begrudging Microsoft for what was (erroneously) interpreted as some sort of paid off order from up high to include the phone in the game. This is obviously entirely untrue; if anyone’s guilty of some sort of slimy promotion, I guess that would be me, as I’d like to get more people interested in a pretty solid other alternative to iPhone (and, again, we’ve got Z0MB1ES on dat ph0ne!!!1)

But I think this illuminates an underlying issue, namely that of Microsoft’s misunderstood role as indie games publisher, and how that ties to the trending media narrative on Microsoft being “bad for indies.” Where do we stand on all this? Read on:

So, Microsoft is publishing Charlie Murder. What does that mean? Here are a few facts to set the record straight:
We have full creative control. This is our game. 100% of the (non-localized) content in Charlie Murder was made by Michelle and me, or, in a few cases, by a few gaming celebrities who we got some rad cameos from (yes, celebrities).
Ska Studios is just Michelle and me. We work in our basement. We have two cats (you knew that).
Microsoft gives us localized text from our English text, finds bugs, tells us how to fix bugs when we’re stumped, tells us how close to passing cert we are, and takes us out to din

Brian Provinciano held a great presentation at GDC2013 about writing and releasing Retro City Rampage. Required watching/reading. One Man, 17 SKUs: Shipping on Every Platform at Once. He does not have many good things to say about working with MS on the XBox Live version.

If you dig a little deeper - you'll find a sizable chunk of people do care/don't purchase that way. From a 2006 report from OTX:

http://gamasutra.com/images/OTXresale/OTXResaleStudy_howotheybuy.png

59% buy new before the game drops in price, 41% find a cheaper alternative (gift, used, bundle, after price drop). Gamestop's numbers are fairly close to this with a 68.5% to 31.5% split, but then again budget conscious gamers like myself don't buy used games at Gamestop because they're usually double the price of the local competition/online/etc

The major thing which is not accounted for in either set of data is the pass around value. Games which leave my collection generally end up in 3-5 hands before being sold/lost track of/damaged/etc.

With GDDR5 memory this could be very interesting.

I would suggest reading this and this. Preventing piracy generally doesn't do much to increase sales.

DRM may help reduce piracy in some circumstances, but the vast majority of pirates aren't going to buy the artist's content regardless of whether they can or cannot pirate it.

DRM doesn't protect the artist's profits. It just limits the potential audience that the artist could be reaching.

If you had asked me a week ago! But it was just announced it's ceasing publication :(

http://gamasutra.com/view/news/190148/Game_Developer_magazine_closing_in_July_2013.php

So much THIS.

To make everyone happy in the household, I implemented a config.sys menu system to load EMS or XMS depending on what task you wanted to undertake. Before that, I was fixing it for every reboot (and every time Mom wanted to use LotusWorks 1.0).

-l

Thank you for playing Wing Commander!

For Android gaming to go mainstream, it will have to start supporting input methods other than the touchscreen. Fortunately, Samsung is coming out with a gamepad for its Galaxy devices, so hopefully they will have enough market power to get app vendors to start supporting them. Other vendors are going to be releasing Android gamepads as well; hopefully they will be compatible.

Android gaming is more mainstream that, windows gaming ever was, and as for waiting for Samsung to release a phone, they are last in a long line of companies that have a Android with build in joypad; the http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/13/03/24/2025228/archos-gamepad-released-in-the-usa archos was announced here at less than $200 only 5 days ago], even Sony has had a device out over 18 months.

For Android gaming to go mainstream, it will have to start supporting input methods other than the touchscreen. Fortunately, Samsung is coming out with a gamepad for its Galaxy devices, so hopefully they will have enough market power to get app vendors to start supporting them. Other vendors are going to be releasing Android gamepads as well; hopefully they will be compatible.

Reminds me of the copy protection on Spyro: Year of the Dragon. It was a layered system, where the first layer was easy to crack, but each time you cracked a layer, another layer cropped up that introduced bugs at some arbitrary point in the game. Fix one bug, you end up introducing another. It was eventually cracked in a rather ingenious way, but it took much longer than any other game at the time.

>Preferably in the form of actual drops in sales, plus evidence that these shenanigans are what caused it.

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/GeraldBelman/20120410/168299/Electronic_Arts__Why_has_its_financial_performance_been_so_poor.php
http://investor.ea.com/financials.cfm

Doing sooooo good they are bleeding money like a guillotined Marie Antoinette. The problem with EA is I think they are so internally fucked that they will not come out of their death spiral. Really for the health of the rest of the industry they need to die.

Fair, I do recall that they did give a bunch of people refunds which prompted them to promise the next one for free. Still, The gamer's bill of rights idea was basically killed dead in the water by stardock because of elemental,

Wardell went on to map out some of his thinking on individual items in the bill, explaining: "On the console, you don't release as many buggy games, because of the pain of patching on consoles, but on the PC, we've gotten to the point where we just say, 'Eh, we'll just patch it.' That's bull. It's wrecking our industry."

"We're going to release things that are done, even if we have to delay it. We're going to not put in obnoxious copy protection. We will support the game after release. We have this set of principles, and there will be a logo on the game that gamers can trust means the game is done, and will be supported."

When you say stuff like that and then go onto release a game which was buggy, unplayed with broken mechanics far too early. People are immediately going to call you out on it as PC gamer did

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=20027

Simply put, customers already are voting with their wallets.

How's that working out for you?

Actually, yes, the way the merger went down does guarantee that for Blizzard. They were not bought by Activision as they turned down Activision when they attempted that.

One of the intriguing things about the old Vivendi structure was that, even when Martin Tremblay joined to run Vivendi's publishing, it was specified: "World Of Warcraft creator Blizzard Entertainment has been designated a stand-alone division reporting to VU Games' CEO, and is not part of Tremblay's product development mandate."

And it's the same deal, more or less, in the new system - Mike Morhaime will continue to serve as President and Chief Executive Officer of Blizzard Entertainment, and no explicit reporting structure is even discussed in the release. Blizzard will continue to plough its own furrow, then.

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=16458#.USJ704e9LCQ

Emphasis added by me.

Again, as I said. Get the facts before spewing shit.

It seems like a lot of contributors here are missing the point. Discussions like this--and particularly the analysis that provokes them, regardless of how perfect it may be--are highly valuable and productive, for the same reason as project post-mortems. Too often, debates about development (where it's styling, methodologies, or rules of thumb) are done before coding begins, and as a result, several things invariably happen:

• * Contributions are made by people with little or no knowledge of the topic
• * Contributions are made by people with little or no experience
• * Too much time is spent debating theory and not practice
• * Minor and unimportant topics absorb the majority of pre-development time and energy
• * Development planning becomes convoluted, and / or ends of being thrown out as actual development begins and unforeseen issues arise

This, of course, is a reflection of the principle that a good engineer learns from his mistakes, while a great engineer learns from other people's mistakes. Both pictures and hindsight are worth a thousand pre-emptive, ill-informed words. I'm particularly pleased with the focus on coding quality, which (in post-mortems and hindsight analysis like this) takes second place to project and management practices. I will take, and have learned infinitely more from, 10 /.-ers debating an informed and evidence-based review of a quality codebase over 1000s of discussions about programming theory, the latest development paradigm fad, or some wannabe game designer's blog post.

Sins of a Solar Empire was made for less than 1 million dollars and was DRM free-ish.

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=20026

Casey Muratori already investigated what your options are for enabling side-loading in Windows 8.

In short: you need to be an enterprise customer, with the machine joined to a domain. Home users: sorry, you're fucked.

Windows 8 is a closed platform, just like the Xbox360 and the PS3 and the iPhone. It is completely unlike the open platform formerly known as "PC". Sensible people should refuse to buy it.

You sure are snarky for someone who is seemingly incapable of using a search engine.

Google: "site:techdirt.com apple arbitrary" They've done a fairly thorough job of documenting Apple's arbitrary policies. Of course, Apple is free to be as arbitrary as they wish, as are the fanboys free to defend them blindly (thanks for your shining example!). And the rest of us are free to criticize their silly approach and enjoy a superior product.

For the lazy ones:
http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2009/04/24/crudebox-becomes-prudebox-to-make-it-into-the-app-store/
http://almerica.blogspot.ca/2008/09/podcaster-rejeceted-because-it.html
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10042127-2.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
http://forum.nin.com/bb/read.php?59,651569
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/91508-Apple-Blocks-Obscene-Newsreader-App
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2009/may/21/apple-iphone
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2008/09/apple-imposes-n/
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/36946/Interview_Molleindustria_On_Phone_Storys_Objectionable_Message.php

I await your apology with bated breath.

These numbers probably stink. Of course everything depends on what and how you measure and define, but... Let's just see the ratio of people who have actually bought a game in a legit way (of course they may have also pirated some).

Opening up my Steam client you get a nice number saying there are 4.3 million people online at the moment. So a quick check on Google and you come up with a number for the US gamer "population" of 125 mill. About as many for the EU since the population is about the same size (I don't consider Asia, here. Maybe that's a big mistake). 30 mill Steam users comes at about 12%. Now if we consider that not all legit gamers are Steam users this number should go way up!

Because they do see a reward for it. Reflextive had piracy rates around 90% and also give stats on how doing certain things resulted in improving sales. http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=17350

The idea of doing nothing will some how make it better is false. World of Goo is about as cheap as you can get, an exceptionally fun game and DRM free and still had 80+% piracy rates on the PC.

> Games do not by definition, have a winning state and conversely a losing state. Many do, to be sure. You might want to read up on the philosophy of games a bit

I quite well aware of the history and philosophy of games for the past 200,000 years. No offense, but let me know when *you* have shipped a few games because you clearly don't seem to understand the difference between what makes something an amusement, puzzle, a toy, or a game. If you are relying on Wikipedia for authoritative definitions no wonder you are confused.

Now I agree there is a lot of overlap between "Entertainment", "Digital Arts" and "Games" but again unless you can *clearly* separate between all 4 (amusement, puzzle, toy, and game) you don't really understand the domain nor the definitions. You are basically arguing that something interactive or amusement is a game. So watching TV is now called game? /sarcasm Please.

Calling a toy a game doesn't make it so. That is like the media calling a programmer a hacker. They are of course related but two *separate* things.

Let's took a look at Will Wright, someone whose games have sold 100 million copies and generated more than $1 billion in sales.

"Spore gives users unprecedented freedom to bring their imaginations to some semblance of digital life. In that sense Spore is probably the coolest, most interesting toy I have ever experienced. But itâ(TM)s not a great game, and that is something quite different."

Why would its *creator* and *designer* call it a toy and not a [good] game, when the public does? Because he understands the *differences* between what makes something a toy and a game.

Other game designers say the same thing. Jonathan Blow creator of Braid had this said about him:

plans to do nothing less than establish the video game as an art form - a medium capable of producing something far richer and more meaningful than the brain-dead digital toys currently on offer.

Games have
* Rule(s)
* Goal(s)

If have no way of winning you have a toy.

References:
* http://www.income-outcome.com/blog/bid/29552/GAMES-vs-TOYS
* http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/10/will-wright-toys-stupid-fun-club.html
* http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/05/the-most-dangerous-gamer/8928/?single_page=true
* http://www.raphkoster.com/2012/03/13/x-isnt-a-game/
* http://gamasutra.com/view/feature/167418/what_makes_a_game.php
* http://gamasutra.com/view/feature/172587/a_way_to_better_games_.php

> Games do not by definition, have a winning state and conversely a losing state. Many do, to be sure. You might want to read up on the philosophy of games a bit

I quite well aware of the history and philosophy of games for the past 200,000 years. No offense, but let me know when *you* have shipped a few games because you clearly don't seem to understand the difference between what makes something an amusement, puzzle, a toy, or a game. If you are relying on Wikipedia for authoritative definitions no wonder you are confused.

Now I agree there is a lot of overlap between "Entertainment", "Digital Arts" and "Games" but again unless you can *clearly* separate between all 4 (amusement, puzzle, toy, and game) you don't really understand the domain nor the definitions. You are basically arguing that something interactive or amusement is a game. So watching TV is now called game? /sarcasm Please.

Calling a toy a game doesn't make it so. That is like the media calling a programmer a hacker. They are of course related but two *separate* things.

Let's took a look at Will Wright, someone whose games have sold 100 million copies and generated more than $1 billion in sales.

"Spore gives users unprecedented freedom to bring their imaginations to some semblance of digital life. In that sense Spore is probably the coolest, most interesting toy I have ever experienced. But itâ(TM)s not a great game, and that is something quite different."

Why would its *creator* and *designer* call it a toy and not a [good] game, when the public does? Because he understands the *differences* between what makes something a toy and a game.

Other game designers say the same thing. Jonathan Blow creator of Braid had this said about him:

plans to do nothing less than establish the video game as an art form - a medium capable of producing something far richer and more meaningful than the brain-dead digital toys currently on offer.

Games have
* Rule(s)
* Goal(s)

If have no way of winning you have a toy.

References:
* http://www.income-outcome.com/blog/bid/29552/GAMES-vs-TOYS
* http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/10/will-wright-toys-stupid-fun-club.html
* http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/05/the-most-dangerous-gamer/8928/?single_page=true
* http://www.raphkoster.com/2012/03/13/x-isnt-a-game/
* http://gamasutra.com/view/feature/167418/what_makes_a_game.php
* http://gamasutra.com/view/feature/172587/a_way_to_better_games_.php

It is interesting to see how a lot of people here are speculating on what is going on in there, and judging Fish for what happened, yet non of them (AFAICS, pardon if I missed some post) has any insight of what is actually going on in that certification process. Obviously, since all devs who know what is going on are tied with NDAs and can't speak about it, anything can be imagined. Reminds of the MS SQL EULA and benchmarking, doesn't it?

I cannot speak about it either for same reasons, and wouldn't do it even as Anonymous Coward, as signed NDA is a signed NDA, and I keep to my word.

But I can certainly say I agree with Fish, as well as with Jon Blow. It is not just the patch pricing. The whole approach to certification, starting with what the actual requirements look like is totally broken on Xbox 360. Previously, everyone (devs) was eating that crap and keeping silent because: (a) Xbox meant revenues, (b) times of retail were different than today's online age. But as importance of PC increases and online distribution becomes prevalent, MS should seriously rethink what they are doing there. At least for the next console. JM2C

Here.

Check out the post from Derek Smart about 2/3 way down the page. (Disclaimer: I don't know any of these people personally).

Still more profitable than Xbox, so it's OK.

Get with the times: Xbox 360 Division Sees $1.32 Billion Profit For FY2011

Yeah and The Tetris Company is very litigious.

Yes, and a lot of them are absolute gems. But you should look in the independent corner, and not the big publisher backed games.

One of the more recent released examples would be Legend of Grimrock. A classic dungeon crawler, with modern graphics, sounds, etc. A 4 man studio working almost a year on a game that made a profit within a few days: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/168617/Oldschool_RPG_Legend_of_Grimrock_covers_dev_costs_in_a_few_days.php

And Legend of Grimrock is not alone. As the numerous successful kickstarter projects, and various indie backed , also have shown is that there's quite a bit of money to be picked up in the niche markets which are easily accessible via PC. Even big name game developers agree that the PC (and with that I also mean Linux, OSX, and not just Windows) is a place where creativity can run its profitable course.

I'm not defending the ending. I only brought it up as an example of what can happen when fans are led to believe that they have an influence on what happens in a story. Leigh Alexander wrote this over at Gamasutra and I believe it:

"One of my friends thought the name of the fan petition, "Retake Mass Effect," (a subversion of the game's own "Retake the Earth" marketing tagline) was particularly interesting -- "as if it ever belonged to them," he reflected. But if games really are the owned vision of a team of creators, then BioWare's first mistake was committing so fully to the fiction that it did.

If you promise your players agency and involvement, they are going to take it seriously. If you use every trick in your repertoire to immerse and engage, to create a sense of ownership, it seems you will need to consider the implications of those promises beyond how much downloadable content you can sell. "

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